Today, many documents are often published via different media or channels (e.g., in print, online, etc.), where some are published in different natural languages (e.g., English, French, German, etc.). A document that is published in different formats and/or in different natural languages is hereinafter referred to as a master document. For example, a master document may be a user manual of a product (e.g., a computer, a piece of software, etc.) marketed in many countries. Thus, the user manual needs to be published in the languages of these countries. Further, the user manual in each of the above languages may be published in print, where a hardcopy of the user manual is packaged with the product, while the user manual is also published electronically on a customer support webpage hosted by the manufacturer of the product. When the user manual has to be updated or revised, one or more persons have to manually translate the changes into each of the supported natural language and then manually edit the corresponding version accordingly in order to publish the revised user manual.
A natural language as used herein generally refers to a language written or spoken by humans for general-purpose communication, as opposed to constructs, such as computer-programming languages, machine-readable or machine-executable languages, or the languages used in the study of formal logic, such as mathematical logic. Some examples of a natural language include English, German, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, etc. Although conventional translation software tools are available to translate a master document from a first natural language into a second natural language (e.g., from English to French), each of these conventional translation software tools typically supports two natural languages only. That is, one has to use another conventional translation software tool to translate the same master document from the first natural language into a third natural language (e.g., from English to German). Further, when the master document is revised, each of the conventional translation software tools typically goes through the entire master document again to repeat the translation process in order to propagate the changes in the revised master document to the translated documents, regardless of the scope of the change made in the master document. Thus, for a relatively small change in the English document, a disproportionate amount of time has to be spent to regenerate the translations of the document.
Likewise, to propagate the change to other electronic versions of the document in different formats, one has to regenerate the entire document in each supported format. For example, using one conventional publishing tool, DocBook, a user may run a script on the entire master document, which has been updated, to regenerate the entire document in different formats supported (e.g., Hypertext Markup Language (HTTP) format, Portable Document Format (PDF), etc.). However, DocBook typically processes the entire master document again to generate output documents in different formats, regardless of the scope of the change made in the master document. Thus, for a relatively small change in the master document, a disproportionate amount of time has to be spent on regenerating output documents in the supported formats.